CRYTEK VISIT: Crysis Hands On Preview

It's 2020. Five archaeologists have gone missing on an island in the Philippine seas and North Korea has taken control of the area. A small Special Forces team has been deployed to scope out the area without causing an international military confrontation. Armed with their nanosuits, this Special Forces team proceeds to recce the area and recover intel. They meet considerable North Korean resistance.

Of course, you are a part of this Special Forces team (Delta Team) and your name is Jake Dunn (codename: 'Nomad'). After some initial voyaging into the heart of darkness everything goes a bit tits-up when a supposed asteroid turns out to be an alien ship. A spruce goose of an alien then reveals itself from the ship and, along with others of its kind, proceeds to xenoform (read: turn to ice) the whole island. This leads to all kinds of bizarre happenings such as Jake Dunn wandering upon a weightless environment and, even less likely, the North Koreans and Americans forming an alliance.

Now, if you're thinking that this is all sounding a little bit familiar, you'd be right. If you replace the Micronesian archipelago with an island in the Phillipine seas, Jack Carver with US operatives wearing bug-like suits, and mutants for aliens; then you've basically got the storyline of Far Cry. It simply smacks of Crytek and, as this is the second game after Far Cry for the Frankfurt based team, who would expect it not to. Other things that resemble their first game are the lusciously rendered jungle environments (more on that later) and the shades of sandbox gameplay within the FPS genre.

Crysis is split-up into levels, some of which flow seamlessly into each other, and others that are spliced up between cut-scenes. We were able to get some hands on with some of the earlier levels that take place before the aliens turn up. While you tend to be shepherded loosely throughout a given level, there's still ample opportunity to attack a set-piece from whichever angle you please. As you might expect, the choice between stealth and all guns blazing plays a large part in this. In one area there was a pesky missile launcher that had to be blown up. Having gone at the problem like Rambo a few times with limited success, we soon realised there was a water tunnel that took you under the enemy and straight to the target. At this point we deposited our payload of explosive - utilising the nanosuit's nifty invisibility feature - and went on our way unseen, leaving a trail of missile launcher debris in our wake.

What really adds to this style of gameplay is that the environments are destructible and interactive enough that, for the most part, you don't feel like you're being dictated to by a rigid progression to the game. Much of this can be put down to the Cry Engine 2, which does a particularly good job with physical objects in the jungle environment. If there are enemies following you across a rickety bridge, for example, simply shoot the bridge out from under them. Similarly, watch the surprise of some North Korean soldiers twiddling their thumbs in a hut when you come down through the flimsy corrugated iron ceiling. You get the idea; basically, an interative and destructive environment helps to open up gameplay opportunities that add to the already varied paths through any given Crysis level.

As if all of that sandbox styled fun wasn't enough for you lucky PC gamers, Crytek has also attached a Sandbox editor similar to the one in Far Cry, allowing players to don their wannabe games developer hats and create some maps for both the single and multiplayer games.

As we already mentioned briefly, the nanosuit is a very handy tool that compliments this open environment perfectly and is one of Crytek's thoroughly original touches to Crysis. The suit is cutting-edge US military technology that, when worn, gives soldiers the choice of four different abilities: invisibility for short periods which also reduces the amount of noise you make; incredible speed that stuns enemy NPCs and allows faster reloads; increased strength (allowing the player to jump higher and inflict deadlier melees) and, finally, increased durability under the shield setting. These potent abilities are then given balance by the fact that they can only be used one at a time, some don't allow you to use a weapon (strength) and others drain your energy supplies quickly (invisibility and speed). Using the suit drains a rechargeable energy source at different rates depending on the ability being used (the shield setting is the most efficient).

The nanosuit has been well balanced in order to help players in whichever way they chose to attack a situation. If you muck-up your carefully laid out stealthy battle plan and start taking heavy fire, the shield setting on the suit can be used to get out of trouble. Likewise, you might want to get up onto high ground so you can scope out an enemy emplacement, but the only way to scale the rock face in front of you is with a higher jump using the added strength. Come November 16th the nanosuit will be your trusty friend - use it, or become a very expensive (not to mention very dead) pile of not so standard issue US military apparel.

While it adds significant depth to the single player experience, it also allows players to take on a wide range of different attack styles in the multiplayer. That's right, TVG also got the chance to experience a good dose of the multiplayer game at the Crysis event last week. Just imagine it: between 20 and 30 top of the line PCs, a similar number of games journos and network games of Crysis' two multiplayer modes - Power Struggle and Instant Action (both of which support up to 32 players at a time). Shamefully for all of us supposedly 'professional' gamers, the results were somewhat haphazard.

This was particularly the case with Power Struggle, which can best be described as Battlefield meets Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The base system is very similar to Battlefield games (i.e. there are a number of strategically placed bases which can be taken if your team stands by them for a short period) and the more bases a team occupies, the more points they have allocated to them for weaponry etc. There are then specific objectives which have to be met for a given game. These include holding certain key bases (such as alien crash sites) in order to produce certain weapons, and destroying the opponents base using key vehicles (e.g. the singularity tank) while all the time avoiding automatic enemy gun turrets. In short, some games on the market only offer you a slightly beefier version of this mode as the whole game, while Crysis gives you a huge single player game and another multiplayer mode as well.

That other multiplayer mode is Instant Action which, as its name suggests, is a classic deathmatch. While the nanosuit does play a pivotal part in Power Struggle, it's in Instant Action that it really shines. Some players will use the speed ability a lot while brandishing as lethal a weapon as possible, meaning that Instant Action is a particularly fast paced deathmatch. We even saw some players stoically using the strength feature, tallying up an impressive number of kills in the process purely by using the melee attack. The freeze gun (available in both modes) was particularly fun in Instant Action: it sprays out a liquid that instantly freezes opponents who must then be swiftly killed with a full metal jacket before they thaw. The result is something like that scene in Terminator 2 where the T-1000's frozen metallic body shatters into a thousand tiny pieces.

While we're on the weapons, the conventional armaments in the single player game can be customised in a variety of different ways. Silencers, grenade launchers and laser tracers are only a few of the various accessories that can be added to the basic package of the rifles and guns on offer, again allowing the player a great deal of freedom concerning the attack style they want to uptake.

As for the vehicles that were on show, the single player levels we played were peppered with military modes of transport ripe for the commandeering. As a general rule, if it's a vehicle then the chances are you can hop in and give it a spin. We experienced what looked very much like Humvees and some nifty little speed boats with gun turrets at the front. In the multiplayer there were an assortment of tanks, military transports and what looked like civilian SUVs (only really useful for ferrying you from one place to another).

Overall, the graphics look absolutely stunning. As you'd expect, the jungle environment is to die for (very literally in some cases as you'll often take a close cluster of bullets to the head while gawping at the scenery). The detail is in the trees, plants and bushes; not only are the colours vibrant and the textures stunning (I'm very aware that I sound like an interior designer), but the engine is so detailed that you'll even see foliage toing and froing with the breeze in mesmerising fashion.

Another astounding visual fest can be found in the water effects. The bodies of water surrounding the island shimmer and reflect the advanced lighting effects perfectly, and that's quite an achievement given that the lighting effects themselves can be held up as fairly cutting edge. Waves wash up on the shore in ways that only poets can describe - I ain't no poet - and there's even nice little touches such as trails of water that flow down your screen as you exit the water.

Unfortunately, creating these hyper-realistic jungle environments is a double edged sword: If you don't make other parts of the game look this good as well, then they start to look slightly average in comparison. Sure enough, some elements of the visuals annoyingly reminded us that this was actually a computer game and we weren't on holiday in Fiji. North Korean NPCs, for example, lack the lifelike appearance of their surroundings and so they seem to stick out like a saw thumb at times. That's a minor gripe though and, overall, it looks like Crytek are preparing to dish out a visual masterclass this November.

We did have another gripe with the NPCs that caused slightly more concern. While the AI was aggressive, it actively sought you out, flanked and took cover at the right times; it was still quite buggy for a game that is so close to release. Now, in all fairness to Crytek, there's still some customer testing to be done before the game goes gold and the build we were playing was a few weeks old. Nevertheless, given how good the rest of the game is and how much you become absorbed by it, we couldn't help but feel that there was something which didn't quite ring true about the AI. That said, enemy AI always gets a large dollop of spit and polish in the closing weeks of development so, if there's any justice in the world, these bugs will be non-existent on November 16th.